Ste Packaging

I will no longer be able to test iPhone applications on the 1.0.2 firmware, as I have upgraded my testing iPhone to 1.1.1, in preparation of going to 1.1.3. My personal iPhone is running 1.1.1 also. Once the test iPhone is happily running a jailbroken 1.1.3, I will likely upgrade my personal iPhone to 1.1.2.

So, goodbye 1.0.2 …

-ste

Yesterday, I worked with Nate True to help him release a 1.1.3 jailbreak for iPhones (FAQ, here). My part of it was the “1.1.3 soft upgrade” package, version 1.0 (he wrote it - I just made it available).

It was discovered that there was a problem with that, if you weren’t starting from a freshly wiped iPhone. Basically, if you had my OpenSSH package installed and performed the upgrade, your iPhone was left thinking OpenSSH (and a lot of other stuff) was still installed. However, because it wasn’t really there, combined with how I wrote the uninstall script for it, you were unable to “uninstall” it and make Installer.app think it was gone, so that you could actually install it again.

While I was asleep, Nullriver was kind enough to create and release a package called “1.1.3 OpenSSH Fix”, version 1.0. After you install it, you will be able to “uninstall” the non-existant OpenSSH package, which will then allow you to reinstall it properly.

I have just released a new version - 2.0 - of the “1.1.3 soft upgrade” package, that addresses this problem. During install, it saves a copy of Installer.app’s LocalPackages.plist file as “/var/root/LocalPackages.plist.old” and then when Nate’s script runs, it deletes the original, making Installer.app forget that anything had been installed. Then, after the upgrade, you are free to install whatever you want, unhindered by Installer.app.

Why did I save a copy of the LocalPackages.plist file, rather than just delete it? Glad you asked. Some people may have moved their Applications directory to the Media partition. After they upgrade, all their old apps (at least the ones that reside entirely in the Applications directory) are still there, but Installer will not know about them. For those folks, they can use the old plist file to edit the new one and add back the apps they want to (if you do this, make sure you keep the 1.1.3 versions of Apple’s apps, and not the old ones). Or, they can delete the copy of the plist file, and delete their old Applications directory and start fresh.

Another problem is that because the “1.1.3 soft upgrade” package ends with a reboot, it cannot clean up after itself, leaving you a “/var/root/Media/softupgrade” directory lying around that takes up around 300MB. If you want, you can ssh in and remove that entire directory after you successfully have upgraded and reinstalled OpenSSH. Look for a “cleaning” package from me soon, that you can just install and uninstall, to clean it up for you if you don’t have OpenSSH installed.

-ste

It seems to be working pretty good for the most part. There have only been a couple of problem reports. As I write this, it’s been 11 1/2 hours since the caching system went into effect when Nullriver updated the “Community Sources” package for me. Since then, 200 cache servers around the world have picked up and started serving the XML file, and the number is climbing all the time. Much better than just my one server serving it!

Already, I am seeing the access.log scroll by slower as I continually tail it. I even see the occasional brief pause in the output - something I haven’t seen in months. So, it looks like the caches are starting to take away some of the load and traffic, as hoped.

If you haven’t already updated your “Community Sources” package to the latest version, please do so. The faster people do, the faster the load on my server goes down. Thanks!

-ste

The latest “Community Sources” package changes the location of my repository’s XML file. Instead of downloading it directly from my site, it will download it from a world-wide caching system. Not only will this eliminate nearly all the traffic to my main server, but it should update faster, for you, as you will get it from the cache closest to you.

Right now, the XML file will age out of the cache after 12 hours. This means that if I add/update a package, you might not see it for as long as 12 hours, no matter how many times you might manually refresh. Once I’m satisfied that this is working ok, I will tweak the settings so that it ages out of the cache much quicker - probably down to 1 hour instead of 12.

Thanks again, to Nullriver, for helping me test this and for updating the “Community Sources” package for me! My thanks to Nate True for suggesting the caching system to me, too!

If this goes well, I will investigate caching the zip files, too.

UPDATE: I have changed the timeout from 12 hours to 30 minutes. So, if I add or update a package you should see it in 30 minutes or less now.

-ste

Please upgrade to Installer.app 3.0b9 as soon as possible. Nullriver has released this update to try and help reduce the traffic on my site so that DreamHost doesn’t shut it down.

What they did, was increase the refresh timeout from 30 minutes to 24 hours. So now, when you run Installer.app, it will not automatically refresh unless it has been more than 24 hours since it last refreshed. Unless people start manually refreshing more (please don’t!), this should drasticly reduce traffic to my main server, as people upgrade to the new version.

My thanks go out to Nullriver for this update!

UPDATE: While I was waiting for this update to come out, I discovered a bug in Installer.app’s MovePath and CopyPath commands. I reported it to Nullriver and this release fixes that bug, in addition to changing the refresh timeout, as described above.

The bug was that, in this XML code:

MovePath
/var/root/Media/Labyrinth/settings.plist
/var/root/Library/Labyrinth/settings.plist

if the “/var/root/Library/Labyrinth” directory didn’t exist, Installer.app would not create it, as it should have. The behavior was the same if you changed MovePath to CopyPath. This bug did not occur when the source was the package being installed.

-ste